Camera Lucida

Camera Lucida begins its eleventh season on October 1. This season we highlight the music of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with late Mozart, late Haydn and early Beethoven. We are casting this critical turning point in European music as an early Romantic utopianism: the adolescence of chamber music, its first flowering as an autonomous, self-conscious expressive form. Our years-long survey of all of the Beethoven string quartets continues with three of the Opus 18 quartets. And in a very special program on April 1, 2019, we present a portrait of late nineteenth century melancholy and decadence: the music of Mahler, Dvorak, Bruch, Berg and Webern.

True to the original social function of chamber music, Camera Lucida is a project of friendship and personal exploration. Jeff Thayer, Che-Yen Chen, Charles Curtis, Anthony Burr and Reiko Uchida, with other occasional guests, have traveled over this last decade through an astonishing range of music; our performances are the outward emanations of an intense interaction of discussion and rehearsal. We welcome our listeners as part of this interaction -- invaluable and indispensable as listening partners and musical friends.